Rogue Scot (Brethren of Stone 4)

Brethren of Stone

Rihanna raced through the crowd at the docks, her breath coming in short gasps. She clutched a few coins in her right palm as though her life depended on holding those few coins. In fairness, it might. That was, if she survived the next few minutes.

A man yelled behind her. “Thief!”

She turned in time to see him point and then she redoubled her efforts to run.

She hadn’t stolen from him. The accusation was blatantly unfair, though he hadn’t given her much opportunity to explain before he raised his fist to extract his coins from her.

She ran without another word. Rihanna had learned the hard way that a woman of her stature should not attempt to explain anything once fists were involved.

Her family practiced the art of fortune telling, and her mother had trained her since she’d been a small child. She’d had a gift for it. Pulling a person’s future from their cards.

That was until five years ago, when her mother had died. Since then, she’d lost the gift. Not that she wanted it back. This life had grown thin. Even when she’d told an excellent fortune, she didn’t always say what customers wanted to hear.

It seemed as though she spent far too much time running exactly as she was now.

Weaving in and out of several sailors boarding cargo, she took a right down a long dock. It was a risk. The dock would end and she could have nowhere else to go. Then again, the pier was exceptionally crowded and might offer a hiding spot.

She untied the red scarf she had wrapped about her head, hoping to be less obvious as she darted between several more sailors, a few giving her a long stare. She noticed a few crates stacked off to the right? Could she hide?

With her head turned as it was, she didn’t notice the man directly in her path until she was just inches in front of him. She attempted to stop but it was too late and her body crashed into his with a force she’d barely imagined. It felt like she’d run into a rock wall.

Hellfire and damnation, now she’d have two disgruntled men on her hands and nowhere to go.

* * *

It was an odd feeling, Reginald Sinclair reflected, as he walked down the busy London docks he’d come to know like the back of his hand these last thirteen years. People rushed about him, unloading goods, or loading them, trying to get their boats out with the tide. They yelled, scrambled, and jostled one another in a rough manner that was accepted as appropriate in the setting.

As an adult, he’d lived two separate and distinctly different lives, so disparate from one another, that thinking of them both at the same time made his head hurt. This one was the first. The life of a sailor. At the age of twenty, he’d been plucked from the open ocean by a passing vessel. He had no memory before that day. The English crew had named him Scott, likely because of his Scottish accent. His past had been erased, his life vanished in a moment. Some things had remained. He’d clearly been a sailor before. He knew rigging, how to sail, how to tack a ship in crosswinds, and how to sense when a storm was coming.

But he also knew how to read and write, add long columns of numbers, and how to use a map to navigate and so he’d quickly worked his way up the ranks of the vessel that had rescued him. It became his sole goal to rise to the top and he used whatever means necessary. They hadn’t all been pretty.

In that time, he’d lived the life of a sailor. He’d gambled, drank, swore, and partook of the occasional woman who caught his fancy.

That was until last year.

Out of nowhere, standing upon this very dock, a man who looked exactly like him had called him from his ship. In that moment, his life before came flooding back. His brothers, his sister, his friends, the man he?

??d been.

He rubbed his temples. That was the problem. The man he’d once believed himself to be held little resemblance to the one he’d become.

In his first life, he loved his sister with a fierceness that had taught him to never take advantage of any woman, no matter how willing. He’d been kind, generous, caring. His family still expected him to be that man. They’d been supportive, overly so. Said they understood he’d led a different life apart from them these last thirteen years. But how could they know what he’d become? They’d surely hate him the way he hated himself if they found out.

He hadn’t remembered his identity, he understood that. But how could he have forgotten his heart? Left his principles and values in the ocean when he’d climbed aboard that boat? He knew right from wrong but he hadn’t been living it those last twelve years.

He wanted to make excuses. He’d had more money as the brother of an earl. The advantage of privilege. He could afford now and before the accident, to hold up principles.

But the truth was, he didn’t need money to be a good man. He’d fallen in the water trying to save his sister’s life. Since then, the only man or woman he’d served was himself.

He thought back to the more atrocious acts he’d committed over the last decade. Self-loathing rose like bile in his throat and he stopped walking. In some ways it had been simpler before he’d remembered.

Closing his eyes, he tried to slow his racing heart.

He knew better than to shut down his senses in a crowd like this, and he paid for his gaff. All of a sudden, someone careened into him, nearly knocking him over.

He reacted without thought, steadying himself and the other person as his eyes flew open. His first actual thought was that the waist he held was tiny. Smaller than any he had ever touched. Then dark brown eyes fringed with long black lashes looked up into his. They were wide with fear, dilated as she panted for breath between lush red lips. Her hands flew to his shoulders and a mass of dark hair flowed down her back, rolling and undulating like the waves of the ocean on a summer day.